Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The Secret to Selling Surface

While the first chapter of Designing Gesural Interfaces implicitly asks,

"Where might multitouch be wanted?"

As a product strategist, I think a more important question that has to be answered first:

Whose big hairy problem does multitouch solve?

The first step in answering this question for a new product category, like multitouch vision systems is identifying:1. Features - What unique things the product does2. Benefits - What these features might be good for.

Here are the F+B's I've seen toutedfor multitouch vision systems.

Features

Let’s lay out the unique features that can be designed into a vision-based system, then figure out what sort of benefits they can create.

Multitouch vision systems, like Surface, have four distinct features. They may be more useful in some environments than others:

To date, the pitches for Surface that we have heard fit into 3 big buckets:

MaintenanceOrder AccuracyGroup Decision Making

Maintenance

Cheap, Readily Available Dumb Objects

One of the core problems with physical computing is that it is so easy for the artifacts that control it to walk off.

Domino tags make vision-based multitouch systems compelling. You can always print more (if you think that big black blobs are ugly, it’s easy enough to print the with an IR absorbent or reflective ink. Ask your printer about varnishes).

Here’s an interesting example from Infostrat:

Durable & Easy to Clean

Independent of what any manufacturer’s rep tells you, no matter how durable a touchscreen is, it’s gonna break and it will always be at an inconvenient time.

It may be possible to cover tabletop with a thin piece of material for use in clean rooms (I haven’t actually tried this and have no idea how it would impact camera calibration/false positives).

Order Accuracy

Multitouch solutions are great for kiosks that require high order accuracy and order confirmation. This is because they combine the accuracy of a barcode reader with the flexibility of a touchscreen… If only Surface could read UPC code.

And as a designer, I'd totally disagree that the first task is to identify the features and benefits. The features you list are basically made-up words from the point of view of actual users. "Blob orientation"? WTF? Although I do like that "easy to clean" is top of mind with your customers. That's some sales-channel-orientation right there.